


and the sun came out.

by milominderbinder



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Big Bang, F/F, Female Stiles Stilinski, Genderswap, Rule 63, Teen Wolf Big Bang
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-03
Updated: 2013-12-03
Packaged: 2018-01-03 04:36:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1065827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/milominderbinder/pseuds/milominderbinder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles Stilinski is five-feet-eight-inches of sarcasm and unbridled nerves, with a mess of uneven curls, and delicate, unusual features, and she’s lanky and clumsy and always has bruised elbows, and she talks too much about too little, and she owns only one pair of battered sneakers for feet too big to really be graceful, and her car is horrific, her driving even worse - she's seventeen and awkward and wild limbed, and she's the complete opposite of <i>everything</i> Lydia wants out of life.</p><p>These are the moments Lydia falls in love with her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and the sun came out.

**Author's Note:**

> so this is my contribution to the teen wolf big bang! It was beta'd by the fabulous itschristaleigh. I was also lucky enough to work with an INCREDIBLE fan artist and awesome human person, [atomiczebra.tumblr.com](http://atomiczebra.tumblr.com) (also known as [tk-sama.deviantart.com](http://tk-sama.deviantart.com), also also known as Alex). I was worried nobody was gonna want to work with my fic since it's a pretty odd pairing but she snatched it up straight away, and drew some truly awesome pics which I never could have dreamed would be so perfect! you can see the master post of the art [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1068675).

 

So it goes like this.

*

For a while after Jackson leaves, Lydia misses him.

Then she gets over it.

And that’s that.  She’s almost killed by her English teacher and she dates an alpha werewolf and she finds out that she’s a friggin _banshee_ and she has strange boxed-up feelings for Stiles that she doesn’t think about, and through all of it, she doesn’t miss Jackson.  So yeah - that’s that.

Until the new year, when she starts to miss him again.

As it turns out, this batch of missing him is less induced by his inherent lack of presence, and more by the fact that it’s the week when every single part of the inside of her car’s engine decides to malfunction at once as she’s driving down the highway. It’s also the week Allison catches the flu off the clerk at the grocery store when he sneezes on the lettuce she’s buying. She then promptly takes to her bed with nothing but a box of tissues and _Maury_ to keep her company.

This wouldn’t especially matter to Lydia if she could just confine herself to the side of her pool with a copy of _Fermat’s Last Theorem_ \- which she’s been trying to finish reading for about a year - and then take her mother’s car out in the evenings, but it’s a school week.  And Lydia Martin does _not_ take the bus.

So it’s a Sunday evening and she’s playing _how to find a ride on short notice when you live on the outskirts of town and are widely regarded as crazy._

She runs through her available options pretty quickly - she refuses to turn up at school with helmet hair, which rules out all her friends with bikes, which turns out to be quite a few (Aiden, Ethan, Scott).  She considers dating a random member of the lacrosse team for the week it will apparently take the mechanic to fix her car, just so they can drive her to school, but she’s not quite sure where she stands with Aiden on the exclusivity front and it seems unworth creating unnecessary drama just when everything has become so delightfully and unusually boring. Plus, there are surprisingly few eligible bachelors with worthy rides at their school. Go figure.

On the platonic-human-friends front, Lydia is recently lacking. While her whole ‘crazy girl who ran naked through the woods’ reputation has died down for the most part, she’s not quite the queen bee she used to be.  Those few members of her posse who happen to own a car either live on the other side of town and aren’t quite devoted enough to go an extra hour out of their way each morning to get her, or already have a full carpool.

All in all, she’s prepared to admit she’s exhausted every one of her options when she finally calls Stiles.

Stiles' Jeep is all very well and good for the occasional desperate rescue attempt or last minute heroic act, transport for all your supernatural disaster induced needs, but in terms of day to day transport it’s somewhat of a step down from what Lydia’s accustomed to.  This is where Missing Jackson comes in; eight thirty in the morning, as she stands at the end of her driveway sipping too-milky coffee from a travel mug, bare knees cold in the bitter spring breeze, feet already aching after a half hour in her horrifically impractical, but contrarily gorgeous, six inch Jimmy Choos.  And okay, maybe it’s not so much Missing Jackson as it is Missing Jackson’s Porsche, but.  Still.  He did drive it very well.

She quickly arrives in the main throes of Missing Jackson’s Porsche when Stiles pulls up in front of her, the Jeep’s engine making worrying sounds rather louder than any engine should have a right to make sounds.  Plus side number one of the Porsche - it purred, rather than _spluttering._

Plus side number two of the Porsche - its proximity to ground level.  Lydia has to practically catapult herself into the jeep, and it’s not graceful.  She dreads to think how she’s going to get out again in the school parking lot.

She has to clear some junk off the seat before she can sit on it, a broken pencil and a few scraps of paper, receipts and torn off notebook corners with nonsensical lists scribbled on them, the signs of a hectic mind.  Then she does up her seat belt and sets her bag on her knees, and finally looks over at Stiles.  And of _course_ ; Stiles is wearing cargo pants with her trademark beat-up red sneakers, and has the handy plus side of being five foot eight - Lydia’s in a leather mini skirt and heels.  This car is really only made for one of them.

“Hi,” says Stiles, beaming just a little too wide as she guns the engine.  She’s enthusiastic about it, which makes Lydia think back to other times they’ve been in a car together, trying to remember if she trusts Stiles’ driving.  She’s slightly comforted by the fact that Stiles’ ridiculously messy hair is pinned back at the temples, so it won’t go flying into her eyes and send them cartwheeling off the road, but that’s where the reassurances end.  Her attempts at a smile turn into a grimace when the Jeep sets off with a rather significant lurch.

She wonders if she could sleep with her mechanic to get a rush on that new alternator.

The ride to school is a half hour long, and Lydia had been thoroughly expecting the whole time to play like Stiles Stilinski’s greatest hits: a nonstop monologue in double time.  She’s pleasantly surprised when Stiles actually just tunes the radio in to a soft indie rock station and drives, both eyes on the road, hands at ten and two.  Occasionally, Lydia glances over and sees Stiles mouthing the words to the song that’s playing.  Mostly, though, Lydia just plays Tetris on her phone, and they don’t talk.

It sounds mean, but Lydia thinks it’s the nicest thirty minutes she and Stiles have ever spent together.

When they pull into the parking lot, Lydia fusses around with her bag and reapplies her lipstick in the rear view mirror for a minute.  She doesn’t notice what Stiles is doing - slightly pointedly - until the car door opens next to her, and she glances around, startled.  All five and three quarter lanky feet of Stiles Stilinski are stood there, one arm held out, waiting to help little Lydia climb out of the death trap of a car in a slightly more dignified manner than she climbed into it.

She recovers from her moment of shock with a smile, and takes Stiles’ hand.

Then Scott pulls up next to them on his ridiculous bike, and the three of them walk into school together, chatting about their weekends.  It’s nice.

They rinse and repeat every morning until Lydia’s car gets out of the shop, and she never once hates it.

She rides in Stiles’ crappy car, and slowly, she falls in love.

*

When Lydia’s eight, she’s in the same class as Stiles Stilinski.

When Lydia’s eight, her parents finally cut their losses and get a divorce, which is by its nature a much more significant event for her than the random dorky girl with the unpronounceable name she sits behind in math class, so.  Stiles isn’t exactly on her radar.

She does know who Stiles is, of course, at least a little.  At the end of the day when Lydia’s waiting to get picked up, she sometimes sees Stiles climbing onto the school bus, looking dorky in overalls or plaid shirts and what seems to be a single pair of beat up sneakers that she wears every day, usually clutching the hand of Scott Mccall, who is equally dorky but who Lydia knows better, because his mom knew her mom in high school.  And for a while, Stiles came to Lydia’s ballet class, though she clearly didn’t want to be there and refused to wear a leotard and occasionally knocked people over as she ran around the room and tended to get distracted five seconds into any routine, so eventually the teacher gently suggested to Stiles’ parents that she might be better off in a little league team for field hockey or lacrosse.  And once, Stiles beat Lydia in a spelling bee, and the whole class was so shocked that the teacher let them go to recess early, and Stiles came up to Lydia with this kind of proud look on her face and Lydia refused to talk to her, and then Stiles bombed the next spelling bee.

The main reason Lydia knows who Stiles is back then, though, isn’t a tenuous link to the kid of a family friend, or her truly horrific fashion choices, or a few shared extracurriculars, or even the regular close proximity to Stiles’ irritating babbling in class.  The reason is something that has the whole town talking.  It’s because one day, she’s waiting at the school gates for her dad, and she catches a glimpse of Stiles getting onto the bus.  Except today, she’s not just another tomboy kid, with her too big plaid shirts and weirdly fitting jean skirts and scraped knees and her messy brown curls.

She’s shaved her head.

There’s maybe a centimetre of hair left, enough to cover her skull and make it look more like a statement than a scalping, but still.  Not much happens in Beacon Hills.  Everyone knows that Mrs. Stilinski is back in chemo, and it’s not working.  So everyone knows why Stiles has suddenly decided to shed the curls - the ones that made her look just like her mom, pre-cancer.

Lydia finds it kind of tragic.  This is back before her own life could be classed as tragic in any way, really, besides her horrifically cliche parental issues, and, of course, the fact that she’s apparently a mythical creature - though of course, she doesn’t know about that yet.  So when Stiles looks over to see if Lydia’s at the gates, like she does almost every day now when she gets on the bus, Lydia does something she’s never actually done before.

She smiles at Stiles.

She feels weird, even as she does it, mostly because it _doesn’t_ feel that weird, maybe because for as much as she rolls her eyes at Stiles’ antics in class, she doesn’t actually mind them all that much. Still.  It’s weird, to be smiling at Stiles, in a way that feels much more genuine than the smiles she shoots her friends every day, even if it is tinged with sadness and pity and a little of that most secret kind of gladness that it’s not _her_ mom who’s sick.

So Stiles looks, and Lydia smiles, and Stiles is so shocked that she stumbles backwards off the steps of the bus she was trying to climb onto.

If it were any other day, Lydia knows people would be laughing, like they always do when Stiles does something clumsy or dumb.  As it is, everyone just looks at her hair, and Scott McCall silently helps her up, and then Lydia’s dad arrives and she doesn’t see what happens next.

The next day, Stiles doesn’t come in to school.

The day after that, she doesn’t come in either.

After a week, there’s plenty of whispers going around the playground about where Stiles has gone off to.  Some seem more likely than others, one seems most likely of all, but it’s not a very nice thing so Lydia decides to get her facts straight.  She goes to see Scott Mccall.

There’s a conversation, and she finds out Stiles’ mom has died.

Later that night, Lydia’s dad comes over with his lawyer to discuss the divorce, and she can hear yelling from downstairs while she’s in bed, trying to read _Moby Dick_.  When her parents yell at each other it always makes her feel bad, but tonight she feels extra bad, because she’s thinking about how much worse Stiles must be feeling.  Lydia doesn’t even know Stiles, not really, but that night, all she can think about is how Stiles has shaved off all her hair for nothing.

She wonders if Stiles’ mom even got to see it.

But she doesn’t fall in love.

*

Stiles comes back to school, eventually, and she’s not as bubbly as she used to be and Lydia has to feel guilty for liking the quieter Stiles better.  But pretty soon Stiles becomes her old babbling self, even if sometimes the babble sounds a little different than it used to, a little darker maybe, a little too cynical for an eight year old, but then they get to middle school and don’t have any classes together so it stops being very relevant to Lydia.  Eventually, Lydia stops thinking about Stiles Stilinski.

And very occasionally, when Lydia _does_ think about Stiles, the thing she thinks about is the fact that Stiles keeps her short hair.

She keeps on keeping it, too, right through middle school, and into Beacon Hills High.  She grows a lot, too, by the time they’re in high school, and loses control of her limbs even more than before, so she becomes this skinny, lanky, awkward, loud girl with a buzz cut.  She becomes all that, and somehow _still_ manages to fade into obscurity.  Lydia’s almost impressed by how nondescript Stiles manages to be to the rest of the world, everything considered.

And then.  And then she starts to grow out her hair.  And _that_ gets her looked at.

And Lydia thinks that maybe, possibly, she'd had something to do with the change.

The moment she realises that is the first time Lydia falls in love with Stiles Stilinski.

*

It happens when it’s May, and the anniversary of Stiles' mom’s death has rolled around once again.  Lydia, of course, has no idea about the significance of the date, until she asks Scott why Stiles is absent from school, and he tells her with his softest puppy eyes and down-turned mouth that Stiles is spending the day at the cemetery.

That's about the most depressing thing Lydia's heard in her life, and she doesn't have a clue why she does it, but when she's driving home from school that day and passes the graveyard, she finds herself pulling over.

Stiles is easy to spot.  She's wearing a bright red sweater and she's the only one there, so Lydia moves towards her, the bright spot in the sea of gray.

Stiles doesn't even seem to register Lydia's presence, for a while. Lydia just perches on the gravestone behind Stiles' mom's, hovering behind Stiles' shoulder, partly because not even she can crouch in six inch heels, and partly because she still hasn't figured out what the hell she's doing there.  Stiles has other friends, better friends, who could be doing this if it needed doing.  Clearly she wants to be alone.  This isn't the first time she's done this.

Then again, she doesn't ask Lydia to leave, so Lydia doesn't.

It's when her butt starts to go numb that she shifts and notices Stiles is silently crying, and that's what makes her finally speak.

"Stiles," she says, because sometimes she thinks that just hearing someone say your name can help bring you back to earth. Stiles wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, drops her head.

“It just hurts,” she says, quietly, voice cracking.

"I know,” says Lydia.  “Maybe it’ll start to hurt less, though.  One day.”

Stiles shakes her head quickly, side to side to side to side, still mopping her tears with her sleeve.

“I don’t want it to.”

There’s a pause.

“ _Stiles_ ,” Lydia says again. ”I think you've mourned her long enough."

She thinks, immediately after she says it, that it was the most horrifically insensitive thing she could possibly have said and Stiles should punch her or something, but truthfully, Stiles doesn’t even acknowledge that Lydia’s spoken.  Like she just hadn't heard a thing.

Then, about a month later, Lydia notices that Stiles hasn't shaved her head in a while.  Her buzzed fuzz is beginning to look more like a pixie cut.

Stiles doesn't mention it, and Lydia doesn't either.  And Lydia doesn’t fall in love.  Not yet.

*

So the summer happens, and then they’re back to school, and things with Stiles are different.  Except it takes Lydia a while to notice.

Not the hair - that’s a big difference but it’s kind of impossible to miss.  It had been noticeable towards the end of the year, but after they return from the prolonged summer separation where Lydia hadn't even looked on Stiles' Facebook, she’s completely shocked by just how _different_ Stiles is now.  Her curls are messy and scraggly, but they're _curls_ , actual visible curls that fall almost to her chin in a relatively cute, if obviously home done, bob cut.  She's still wearing much the same clothes, dumb t-shirts and boys’ jeans, but her new hair makes her look softer somehow, frames her face and actually makes her look kind of _pretty_.

Not that Lydia would ever admit it.

So yeah, she notices that straight away. The other thing, the thing thing that Lydia _fails_ to notice for a really embarrassingly long time, is the change in how she sees Stiles - hell is _that_ out of the blue.

When she does notice it, it’s so strange that she has to put parts of it in little separate boxes in her head, and strange memories become significant in ways they never should be.

 

That’s why, for a while, whenever Lydia thinks of Stiles, the first thing that flashes to mind is always this same entirely insignificant moment.  Lydia’s outside the mall, waiting for Allison to pick her up, buying god awful coffee from a cart she’s seriously considering suing, and she turns around, and there’s Stiles. Other side of the street, just getting out of her crappy old jeep.  And all of a sudden it’s like Lydia’s head just puts all the pieces of her together. Stiles is five feet eight inches of sarcasm and unbridled nerves, with a mess of uneven curls and delicate, unusual features, and she’s lanky and wearing red corduroy shorts with bare legs so Lydia can see her scraped knees, and that dumb red hoodie that hangs off her frame and a t shirt advertising some old brand of milkshakes and battered sneakers on feet too big to really be graceful. She's seventeen and awkward and wild limbed, and in that split second of seeing her, something inside Lydia just switches _on_.

 

She starts avoiding Stiles, after that.

It’s contradictory, because she avoids Stiles, avoids Stiles, avoids Stiles, _falls in love_.

*

Lunch time politics at Beacon Hills High School are complex and ever changing.  Lydia can still recall with clear satisfaction the looks of complete terror on Stiles and Scott’s faces the first time she’d sat at their table, more than a year ago now.  It had been a complete disregard of everything they were programmed to think about their hierarchy, but at the same time, it had been so simple. Allison was cool because she was friends with Lydia, and Allison liked Scott, and Scott was all of a sudden really good at lacrosse, so the match could be approved, and Lydia had processed all of this and then changed seats at lunch. The high school food chain then shifted accordingly to accommodate the situation whilst leaving her thoroughly on top, as was its job.

Simple.

Things didn’t always stay that simple, though.  When things got bad there, for a while, like _really_ bad, she’d rarely known what to do with herself when she stepped into the cafeteria.  The popular crowd and the intense-friendships-formed-by-escaping-unspeakable-supernatural-evils-together crowd weren’t exactly known to mesh, and Lydia was left rather unsure where her loyalties lay.

Her saviour from this torment, as it turns out, is Ethan.  Or, to be more specific, _Danny_ and Ethan, Ethan-and-Danny, and the way they seem to blend into one entity by virtue of being so completely and compatibly in love.  They make it simple.  They become the mesh point for her circles, now that Ethan’s on their side of the unspeakable-evils thing, now that him and Scott are working together and getting along.  Danny’s still Danny - hot, funny, good at lacrosse, everyone-likes-Danny - and he still doesn’t have a clue that he’s dating a werewolf, or indeed that werewolves exist at all, so he’s still thoroughly human and popular and therefore brings the popular human crowd with him.  And so after a period of intense social stress, Lydia’s lunchtimes sort themselves out, in the way that high school problems are wont to do.

It’s after her car breaks down and Allison has that flu, the week that everything starts, for _real,_ but it’s before they get a new English teacher, a bland man so close to retirement that he never bothers to assign them anything but silent reading.  It’s a period of calm in Lydia’s life, and she’s enjoying it in a way her one hundred and seventy IQ points can never quite find a way to describe.  It feels only too natural to be able to slide into a shiny cafeteria chair opposite Stiles, next to Ethan, and roll her eyes at the flustered expression which appears on Stiles’ face as she tries to hide the fact that she’s in the middle of a demonstration of how many cheetos she can fit in her mouth at one time.

“Hi,” Lydia says sweetly, addressing the table at large as she begins unwrapping her salad, but looking across at Stiles through her eyelashes and trying not to laugh at the hamster cheeks.

Stiles tries to make a noise in response and just ends up spraying Scott with crumbs.

Of course, if there’s one wild card in this sea of calm, it’s Lydia’s love life.  This fact is broadcast to the world by the fact that in the corridors, Aiden leans on her locker and kisses her and flirts with her so hard she sometimes worries he might strain something, but every single day when their friends gather for lunch in the cafeteria, he doesn’t turn up.

She tries to ask Ethan where he goes, once, but the look on Ethan’s face says that he doesn’t have a clue either, so.  That’s that.

She doesn’t actually see him much outside of school, either, bar the occasional booty call or the few times she forces him to take her to dinner, but since nobody else has to be witness to that it doesn’t bother her so much.

Of course, just Lydia’s luck, if there’s one person who never misses a single lunch period, it’s Stiles.  She defies the logic of detention and sick days, laughs in the face of extracurricular activities, and apparently refuses to battle supernatural arch villains before one thirty five pm, all for the sake of being sat right at that scratched metal cafeteria table every single time Lydia happens to wander up to it.

Or at least, that’s how Lydia sees it.  The one time she relays that sentiment to Ethan, in fewer words and a suspicious tone of voice, he laughs and tells her finding out she’s a mythical creature has made her paranoid.

So.

So it’s Stiles Lydia ends up eating lunch with, every single day.  Stiles and Ethan and Danny and Scott and Alison and Isaac and endless other popular kids from Beacon Hills High, except they all seem to be paired up or settled comfortably into sub-groups with different conversations going on, so yeah, mostly, it’s Stiles and Lydia.

The first day Stiles sits next to Lydia, she’s jittery, trying to hide the fact that she’s nervous as she slings her bag over the chair and says, “ _Yo,”_ and Lydia finds it hilarious.  She watches Stiles through the whole lunch hour - Stiles nibbling around the edges of an apple, trying to pretend she’s deeply involved in a conversation down the table whilst sliding her eyes to the right and attempting to sneakily glance at Lydia every five seconds.  Every time their eyes meet, Lydia raises an eyebrow, and Stiles blushes.

When the bell rings, Stiles’ whole body seems to deflate with relief, and she’s out of her chair straight away.

“Well, it’s been a ball,” she says, grabbing her bag in one hand and Scott in the other, and making a hasty retreat from the cafeteria.  A few steps away she trips over someone’s bag and knocks a lunch tray onto the ground.  Looks around quickly to check if anyone saw, then strolls as casually as she can away from the wreck, Scott laughing behind her.

Lydia looks at Stiles’ half-finished apple, abandoned on the table, and falls in love.

*

Lydia really isn’t quite sure how this happened.

A few months ago she’d been well aware that she was spending really a lot of time with Stiles.  It was probably more time than she was spending with Allison, or her parents, or even at school for that matter towards the end of the particularly life threatening drama.  But the thing was that the time they spent together didn’t really seem like it counted, because it had all been in high pressure life-or-death scenarios where they didn’t have any other choice but to band together to keep their dumb friends alive.  The system was working pretty well for them, in that they suffered no casualties (their side, at least) and escaped the whole murderous alpha pack/serial killing English teacher double pack of evil with only a minor amount of post traumatic stress disorder to share around.  All in all, Lydia would say they could rate the entire year a relative success, considering how many times she was convinced they were all gonna die horrible deaths and they managed to somehow avoid it.

But then, somehow, this change happened.  Suddenly, she wasn’t just going to Stiles when she stumbled across a mutilated corpse or needed to prevent a string of mystically induced werewolf suicide attempts.  No, not at all - now, she was asking for other things.  Littler things.  The kind of things you would ask of a friend.  Like could Stiles lend her this book because Lydia left her copy at her dad’s place, and could Stiles go over this science project her with her because Lydia thinks best with someone to bounce ideas off, and could Stiles pick her up from this party because the person who was supposed to be her designated driver ended up getting trashed, and oh since Stiles is here she should stay a little while and hang out with Lydia’s friends and okay maybe they should play one game of pool before they go.  And before Lydia knows it, she’s spending just as much time around Stiles as she was when they were trying to stop four different groups of people from murdering them.

Only this time, because it’s not life-or-death and because they’re actually talking about something other than mythical creatures and age-old feuds, the time feels like it _counts_.

And now - and now.  And now here they are.  And now they’re stood together, in an empty classroom.  And now there’s a hum in the air and Lydia feels too hot, like her skin is prickling under her designer clothes.  And now they’re supposed to be studying for English together, except they’re not, because _something’s_ changed.

Well, something’s changed for Lydia, anyway.  Lydia, who’d been quite casually waiting in the classroom for their study group to arrive, texting idly, leaning on the desk.  And then Stiles had come in, and Lydia’s body had betrayed her and started _humming,_ which was and _is_ ridiculous.  And Stiles had told her that Scott and Allison were ditching the rest of the day, so it was just the two of them for study group.  And then Lydia froze - couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, because she was alone in a room with Stiles and she _didn’t know why that mattered._ And that’s where she still is right now.

“English,” says Stiles, dropping her bag on the floor, as though she’s reminding Lydia why they’re supposed to be there.

And then - Lydia just can’t _stand_ it anymore.  She lunges forwards, grabs Stiles by the back of the neck, pulls her head down, _kisses her._ Their lips bump together messily but Lydia doesn’t care, she’s trying to press every inch of her body against Stiles’, grabbing Stiles’ hair, drinking her in, filling her body with this crazy buzz under her skin, this gorgeous heat that consumes her from head to toe as Stiles’ hands find her waist, clench in her shirt, brush against her bare skin, the lightest scratch of fingernails, and Lydia’s squirming and panting and going _crazy._

And god, it’s nothing like she’d imagined, all those late nights when she couldn’t fight the wanting anymore, couldn’t keep her boxed up feelings in the right boxes, and _had_ to think about it, because then she’d pictured it _perfect,_ warm and passionate and soft in a way guys could never be, and so, so satisfying, like quenching a thirst she’d had her whole life.  And this, this reality, this isn’t perfect, but _god_ is it better than that, messy and frantic and anxious, and Stiles’ lips are rougher than Jackson’s had even been, and it’s just making Lydia’s wanting _worse._  She’s pressing Stiles into the wall, she’s surrounding her, and Stiles’ hands are fumbling about Lydia’s waist and hips and messing up her outfit, and Lydia doesn’t even care, because Stiles hadn’t hesitated for a _second_ before she started kissing Lydia back and that’s all that matters, that’s everything.

So Lydia kisses her and kisses her and keeps on kissing her, runs her fingers through Stiles’ hair over and over again, getting caught in the tangles of her curls, and she keeps kissing even as she’s freaking out inside, even as her brain is _screaming_ at her to stop, _stop, why are you doing this, you’re going to ruin everything, nothing will ever be the same again, you need to stop right NOW!_

And Lydia keeps on kissing, because right then, Stiles’ chapped, jello-flavored lips are all she needs to know.

And then - and then.

And then it’s _Stiles_ who pulls away.

And Lydia, Lydia who has flushed cheeks and stinging lips, Lydia whose hands are still clenched in Stiles’ hair, Lydia who’s on the verge of crying from the intensity of it all - well, of all the things she expected, Lydia never expected _that._

“ _Lyd,”_ Stiles says, voice barely more than a whisper, a soft gentle creature that escapes from her unbidden, but the creature turns savage in the air and suddenly, suddenly, that half-word has brought Lydia screeching back to reality.

And that’s when her body suddenly starts listening to her brain again and she pulls her hands away from Stiles, stumbles backwards, can’t even process what just happened, can’t even _breathe._  And then she’s across the room in a second, grabbing her bag and bundling it into arms, grabbing randomly at the English notes she’d had laid out on the desk, all of them scrunched and flying about and she doesn’t even care that she’s leaving half of them behind as she _races_ out the door, can’t even look at Stiles’ face, can’t even _think_ about it - just has to get out of there, even though the damage is already done, even though _everything_ has already changed.

She skids down the corridor faster than she knew it was possible to run in heels, doesn’t stop until she reaches the parking lot.  She can’t find her car, so she just collapses against the wall of the school, slides down it til she’s sitting on the floor, and puts her head on her knees, focuses on breathing, _in out, in out, in out_.

Lydia Martin is not gay.  Leaning against the wall, tears finally coming in wretched sobs that almost break her, she knows this, and she falls in love anyway.

*

She wants to call Allison, but she can’t, because she doesn’t want Allison to know.  Know that Lydia might like _Stiles_ of all people, or know that Lydia cheated on Aiden, or that Lydia doesn’t even _like_ Aiden, because Allison had been so excited about the two of them having werewolf boyfriends together. And besides, it would be weird, right? To tell a girl she’s had sleepovers with and changed in front of and professed her completely platonic love for, it would be weird, to say that she might like girls.  It would change things, and Lydia’s never had a best friend before Allison, and she likes it too much to ever want to screw it up.

Then, she wants to call Danny.  They were never really friends before Jackson, but they’re still friends after him, and he’d _get_ it.  He’s been through this.  At least some variation of this, somehow, however long ago, he must have suffered this confusion the first time he looked at a boy and felt things inside himself light up.  But then, that would be weird too, wouldn’t it, if all this _does_ turn out to not be true at all, if Stiles’ relative androgyny is confusing something in Lydia’s brain and she’s straight after all, or if it’s just curiosity, a fucked up phase, and she grows out of it.  It would make Danny think of her differently.  Like she didn’t take it all seriously, this thing that’s such a big part of him.  Like she could turn it on and off.

There’s safety in anonymity, she thinks then, safety’s in obscurity, but what can she do about that? Even the thought of calling one of those hotlines makes her cringe.  What would she even say? So much of why she maybe, possibly likes Stiles is hinged on heroic feats of magic and werewolf-induced problems.  She can hardly tell all that to a stranger and still expect to get some helpful advice about her gay panic.

So she thinks, what’s a compromise? Someone she knows, but not well enough for it to matter if they think of her differently? If they witness her in a moment of uncertainty, her prom queen persona still back in that classroom with Stiles, Lydia now bared to the bones of her soul and desperate?  And who’s someone who might actually have some useful advice, too, someone who’s maybe been through this, or something like it, someone who won’t judge or preach or even really _care?_

So she texts Ethan.

When she thinks about it, she realises she doesn’t have a clue where Ethan and Aiden are living these days, which is probably a little worrying.  So at eight O'clock that night she just texts _Meet me in the school parking lot asap, bring coffee, milk no sugar,_ and hopes he turns up.

When he does, he’s rightfully confused, but he has her coffee and brought some donuts to boot, so she’s immediately confident she made a good decision turning to him.  They sit on the hood of her car together, drinking coffee and nibbling on the kind of carbs Lydia would usually be disgusted by.  There’s a chill in the winter air and her coat’s not really enough to keep her warm now the sun’s gone down, but she kind of likes that.  The freshness, the tingle just underneath her skin which keeps her alert, awake, keeps her mind whirring.  She needs that right now.

“Lydia,” Ethan says, eventually, when the silence has officially become ridiculous.  “What’s going on? I mean, it’s not that I don’t like you or anything, but I don’t really think I know you well enough to judge if you’re okay right now.”

Lydia sighs.  So this is it, then.

“I kissed Stiles,” she says, while she still has the nerve.  “I _made out with_ Stiles.”

Then there’s a bit more silence, and Lydia keeps drinking her coffee, and Ethan’s face goes through about fifteen separate expressions while he tries to figure out how to respond.

“Okay,” is what he goes with, eventually.  “And… and how do you feel about that?”

Lydia has to laugh.  If she wanted therapy, she’d go to a therapist. Ethan does a pretty good impression of one, though, or he would if they weren’t sat on her car in a dark school parking lot drinking cold coffee.

“I feel like I liked it,” she says, not like there’s any point in lying now.  “And I’m scared shitless by that, and I need someone to talk to, so please, talk to me about it.”

“About… about being gay?”

“ _Ugh._ No. I don’t know.  Talk to me about other stuff to do with liking a kiss.”

“Well, there’s not much else to say, Lydia. I think the only reason you’re freaking out and scared about a kiss is because you’re scared of being gay.”

"No, it's not _about_ being gay," she says, adamant, throwing her hands up, "it's about the fact that I’m _not_ gay, or bisexual, or _anything_ like that. Or at least, I've never thought I am.  I'd say I know myself pretty well.  I'm not in denial, I'm not being deliberately obtuse, it's not about feeling attracted to a girl, it's about having to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about myself.  My whole life, I've liked guys.  I've dreamed about the love of my life being a guy.  I don't want any of that to change.”  She pauses for a moment while Ethan processes this.  Then she says, “and, just, did it have to be _Stiles?_ ”

Ethan laughs at that.

“Never tell her I said this,” he murmurs, “because I wouldn’t want her to think I _like_ her or anything, but.  Well.  I think you could do worse.”

Lydia thinks about that, and yeah - she falls in love.

*

The sleepover is the night that Lydia learns that Stiles owns exactly one skirt.

(The story of the sleepover is another thing altogether, but the story of the skirt goes like this - It’s pink and floaty and knee-length and basically the complete opposite of everything else Stiles has ever worn.  It sits in a bag with a tube of mascara and a pair of black tights, neglected and despised, at the back of Stiles’ closet, behind the ripped leggings and old jeans and mens’ flannel shirts that she actually chooses to wear every day.  Stiles gets the bag out exactly three times a year, when her grandmother visits (Christmas, Thanksgiving, Stiles’ birthday), in order to create the illusion that she is in fact a totally normal and well developed teenage girl who hasn’t been affected at all by being raised by a single father.  The only reason Stiles even bothers to create this illusion - most of which is really at her father’s insistence - is that her grandmother is slightly insane and once tried to take custody of Stiles, right after her mom died, which is about the worst thing that could possibly ever happen to that tiny branch of the Stilinski family. So they take preventative measures to look like the normalest, most stable family there is. Despite the fact that Stiles had been an adamant tomboy _long_ before her mother died.

The only time Scott ever sees Stiles in the skirt is when he comes to her house on her fifteenth birthday to give her the new Mario game, which he has thoughtfully half-wrapped in paper with Christmas trees on it.  He laughs so hard Stiles is forced to punch him in the stomach and shut the door in his face, and then tell her father it was Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Of course, she takes the game first.

So Stiles wears the skirt three times a year, and tries not to think about it in between.

Of course, the whole ‘not thinking about it’ thing has kind of gone up in smoke given that Allison is currently waving it in front of her face.)

They’re in Stiles’ bedroom.  Lydia’s there because Allison dragged her, but she’s just sitting in the corner filing her nails and trying not to make eye contact with Stiles.

For some reason, since getting back together with Scott, Allison has made it her mission to include Stiles as ‘one of the girls’.  Lydia knows for a fact that this is, to be frank, Stiles’ worst nightmare - as she has been repeatedly informing them, though Allison has apparently chosen to develop selective hearing.  Stiles thinks Allison is trying to torture her, but Lydia thinks that Allison is simply following the age old advice of ‘keep your enemies closer’ - how she and Stiles are actually enemies is a long story, but it basically involves Allison’s strange delusion that Stiles is in love with Scott, having somehow missed the fact that Stiles is the gayest thing since roller derby and even if she weren’t her dating Scott would be like some disgusting kind of pseudo-incest.  Scott, oblivious as ever, hasn’t noticed this odd form of rivalry yet, and Lydia finds it so amusing that rather than alert Allison to any of the previous points she’s decided to just let it all play out.  

Which seemed like a great plan until Allison started throwing around the idea of makeovers.

“Stiles, this is cute!” Allison exclaims, holding up the skirt that she’d sniffer-dog hunted out of the back of Stiles’ closet.  The amount of shock in her voice so extreme that Lydia feels slightly insulted on Stiles’ behalf.

“Sure, if you’re into the whole girl-who-gets-killed-at-the-beginning-of-an-eighties-slasher-film look,” Stiles replies with a sigh, falling back onto her bed.  Lydia definitely doesn’t peek at the way her shirt stretches across her body when she’s lying down.

“I suppose it is marginally better than the rest of what you try and pass off as clothes,” Lydia says a moment later, not looking up from her nails. It’s one of the first times she’s spoken to Stiles since _it_ happened, and she hopes her voice doesn’t betray how fast her heart is beating. “Though that’s not saying much.”

Stiles bumps her head on the wall in her scramble to sit up.  Apparently she’d been expecting Lydia to stick with the silent treatment forever.

So Lydia sighs and turns back to her magazine and affects the most bored expression she knows how to make, trying to weigh whether it’s really worth suffering this just so she can continue to see Allison turn green whenever Scott talks to Stiles at a range closer than three feet.

She decides it is, but only by an extremely slim margin.

After Stiles turns down the makeover enough times for Allison to get the idea, they decide to watch a movie.  The word ‘decide’ is used loosely in context.  Lydia _demands_ that they watch a movie, because she wants something that takes the pressure off talking, and then vetoes every single film in Stiles’ collection - seriously, nobody should own that many superhero movies, it’s just not right - until Allison suggests they download something online.  Lydia suggests _Legally Blonde_ , in a tone of voice she often uses to suggest things because people usually don’t argue with it.

Then, while they wait for the movie to load, they get changed into their pajamas.

It’s a night of learning things.  Tonight, Lydia learns that Stiles sleeps in black leggings with a hole in the knee, a Beacon Hills Phys Ed t shirt, and odd socks.

She wishes she didn’t find it adorable, and wedges herself into the very corner of the couch so she can use Allison as a buffer while they watch the film.

And still, the whole night, it’s like she’s breathing Stiles.  She can’t even see Stiles’ face, and all she can think is how she’s reacting to the film, what funny faces she’s pulling while she eats popcorn, whether she’s getting distracted or whether her eyes are glued to the screen.  She doesn’t even know if Stiles has seen this movie before.  She doesn’t, really, when it gets right down to it, know much about Stiles at _all._ She knows where Stiles lives, the vaguest facts about her parents, what classes she takes at school, that she likes some video games.  She knows an awful lot about Stiles’ _personality,_ the way she sees things, interprets things, could probably predict exactly how she’d react in any ridiculous situation.  But in terms of the facts? Favorite colors, food allergies, childhood pets? Lydia suddenly feels woefully uninformed.

And that seems like it matters, all night, after that, that she’s kissed this weird girl and she still doesn’t know why or what she’s going to do about it or what any of it means, but more importantly - _most_ importantly, she’s kissed a weird girl without knowing anything about her.

And that matters, all night, until it doesn’t.  It matters all through watching the movie and having hot chocolate in the kitchen and setting up sleeping bags in the living room, and it matters under the cover of darkness where they talk about werewolves and witches and whatever Lydia is more candidly than they’d dare to in the light of day, and it matters right up until Allison falls asleep, awkwardly half-leaning against the sofa, and Lydia looks over her head and suddenly, with so much longing, meets Stiles’ eyes.

Stiles’ eyes, which are warm and brown and welcoming and _intense_ and staring right back at Lydia.  There’s a silence in the room, a kind of peaceful quiet, while the rain pours down outside and Allison snuffles in her sleep and Lydia and Stiles just look at each other, quietly, for so long that Lydia loses track of the time.

Lydia feels peaceful, which is rare, so she falls in love.

*

For a week after the kiss, Lydia skips lunch.  She makes various excuses, loudly, in close proximity to Stiles but not _actually_ talking to her - studying for calculus, nursing a migraine, helping grade papers for extra credit, meeting Aiden - but she’s sure that anyone who knows her at all, which, sadly, includes Stiles, will be able to tell they’re all complete bullshit.

Still, she skips lunch for a week.  Then the sleepover happens.

She skips lunch for another week.

She can tell that Stiles is hurt, this time.  The first week had been fair game.  But after _whatever_ moment they shared at the sleepover, Stiles had been expecting something.  Not grand exclamations of love - though she’d probably fantasized about those, too - but _something._ She’d expected to sit together at lunch, maybe, to hang out at school, to study together, to be friends if nothing more.  And Lydia can’t _do_ any of that.  At least, not for a while.

So Stiles is hurt, and Lydia is confused, and hurt because she’s hurting Stiles, and just generally clueless as to what she should do, which isn’t something she’s used to experiencing.  Lydia Martin _always_ knows what she’s doing and where she’s going.  Except with freaking Stiles Stilinski.

Eventually, Allison gets weird about why Lydia’s skipping lunch, starts guessing things Lydia doesn’t really need people to be guessing at, so she gives up her boycott on the third Monday after their kiss, and comes back to the cafeteria.

And of course, when she gets there, the only free seat is next to Stiles.  Lydia, warrior of the highest order, who over the course of her life has survived supernatural evils, catfights with cheerleaders, and midterms she hasn’t studied for, holds her head high, doesn’t let anyone see her tremble, and slides silently into the seat.

The babble around them is loud enough to mask their silence, and Lydia’s never been so grateful for Scott’s impossibly animated play-by-plays of lacrosse practice.  She’s also never been more grateful that Ethan’s sat at the other end of the long table.  Every time he sees her with Stiles, he shoots her the kind of sympathetic looks she hates more than anything in the world.

Lydia opens her tub of disappointingly wilted salad, and doesn’t look to her left.  She picks up her fork, and doesn’t look to her left.  She undoes the cap of her environmentally friendly reusable water bottle, takes a sip, _doesn’t_ look to her left.

She does look down, though, at the table, and she doesn’t even have to move her head, just flick her eyes ever so slightly, to catch a glimpse of Stiles’ lunch.

Stiles’ hands are shaking as she tries to peel the lid off a cup of jello.  Lydia watches, hair curtaining her face so people can’t tell where her gaze is trained, can’t tell that she’s watching long, thin, pale, awkward fingers fumble and twist and shake with nervous energy.  She doesn’t look at Stiles’ face, can’t, knows that it will be flushed, ever so slightly, and her lips will be trembling like her fingers, and it’ll break Lydia’s heart if she tucks her hair behind her ear and glances so close to her left and sees all that happening.  Nobody else can tell a single thing is wrong between them, and they’re sat so close that Stiles’ skinny elbow rubs against Lydia’s arm as she tussles silently with her food, and Lydia’s stomach is coiled in a tense kind of pain, her breath coming just a little short, like the anxiety seeping off of Stiles is seeping into her, too.  It’s hell.  All she wants to do is _breathe._ All she can do is watch Stiles’ fingers.

They’re shaking faster now, too fast, like Stiles is overflowing, and Lydia can’t help it - she chances a peek through her hair to see Stiles’ face.  But Stiles is hiding behind her hair, too, probably grateful she grew it out for just this reason, because Lydia thinks Stiles might be on the brink of tears.

She can’t help it - she has to.

Has to put down her fork and reach over, slowly, gently, like you’d approach a baby animal, and lay her hand on top of Stiles’.

The shaking goes suddenly, wonderfully, still.

Lydia leaves her hand on top of Stiles’ for a moment, because suddenly all the air is back in her lungs and she still feels pained but she doesn’t feel so goddamn _tense_ anymore, and it’s a wonderful kind of relief.

Then she pulls the lid off the jello, and goes back to her own lunch without a word.

Stiles doesn’t say anything either, and leaves the table before Lydia gets the courage to look up again.

Lydia falls in love, and it _hurts._

*

"You know, as courting rituals go, this is pretty strange."

Lydia shoots a scathing look to her right, where Stiles is sat, lolling about in the passenger seat of Lydia's car and yawning.  She's wearing the same black leggings with a hole in the knee she’d had on at the sleepover, fluffy socks, her red sneakers, a dark hoodie with a character from World of Warcraft on the front.  Her hair's piled into two topknots, even messier than usual.  There’s a smudge of luminous cheeto-dust on her cheek that Lydia’s spitefully not pointing out.

Lydia doesn't have a clue why she thought this would be a good idea.

"I'm not _courting_ you, Stiles," she replies, only half her attention on the conversation as she tries to decide if she should run a stop sign or not.  Stiles yawns, pointedly.  Lydia rolls her eyes.  "And I know you weren't asleep.  I could see the pathetic green tinged light of a video game addict coming from your window when I pulled up outside your house."

"It's 3am, I so _could_ have been asleep.  And that's not the point."

Lydia would have a retort for that, but that’s when they arrive at the supermarket, so she saves her energy for parking the car.

There’s an explanation for why they are where they are, but it’s not a very good one.  It’s that Lydia’s mom is out of town for three weeks, and Lydia had declined to stay with her father on the grounds that it would be _awful,_ so she’s basically living alone.  Another plot point in the tale is the fact that Lydia’s mom had cancelled their usual grocery delivery before she went away, for a myriad of reasons unknown to Lydia.  Another significant point is that although Lydia Martin is almost superhuman in aspects, could repair the engine of a jet plane with one hand or solve Fermat’s last theorem in algebraic rhyming couplets, one of the few things she has never actually attempted is grocery shopping.  Lydia’s recently developed insomnia also has a hand in the events. It’s still a bit of a leap to get from all of that to the fact that she got in her car at 3 am and drove over to Stiles’ house to enlist her in a massive grocery shopping spree at the Walmart two towns over, but.  Yeah.  Lydia’s brain doesn’t always think in logical steps - sometimes her thought patterns dance beautifully around the edge of logic, never quite making contact with it at all, but usually producing satisfying end results.  Hence: Stiles, Walmart, the early hours of the morning.  She’s fine with it all.  Sort of.

The neon lights of night time Walmart are perhaps the least flattering lighting any human could ever be put under, but Lydia still finds her eyes are glued to Stiles - pale, messy haired, ridiculously dressed Stiles - as she kicks off with one sneaker and goes whizzing down the aisle on the back of the shopping cart.

"If you don't stop that, they're going to kick us out," Lydia hisses, hurrying down the aisle after Stiles, trying to ignore the squishy feeling in her stomach which actually thinks Stiles is being kind of _cute_.

" _Who_?" Stiles responds, incredulous, and is right.

Lydia doesn't grocery shop, but she especially doesn't grocery shop at 3 am, so she'd really had no idea what to expect.  She'd expected anyway.  She'd expected it to honestly be pretty busy; everyone in Beacon County with a pregnant wife out in their pajamas buying ice cream and pickles, sleep deprived college students by their dozens in the instant food aisle, disgruntled employees just getting off the night shifts at shitty jobs come to comfort eat multipacks of chips.  Instead, it's truly just Stiles and Lydia - them, and a single dead eyed cashier at one of the counters, who'd been slumped over the cash register asleep when they'd arrived, and when the door slammed shut had jerked awake in a graceless flail that reminded Lydia a lot of Stiles.

Still, Lydia grabs Stiles’ arm to stop her from trying to perform a circus act on the shopping cart, and that kind of shocks them both enough that the subject is dropped.

"Okay, so, what do you actually _need_?" Stiles asks, clearing her throat and looking around at the aisle they’ve ended up in.

Lydia thinks about it for a second.

"I have no idea."

"Do you have a grocery list?"

"No.  I guess I didn't think it through that much."

That’s when Stiles gives this sigh, the kind which her whole body moves with, her arms flinging out to the sides and her knees buckling slightly as though she’s sending a call out to the universe, _why me, why have I been chosen to have this huge burden inflicted upon me, there is nobody in the cosmos suffering more than me right now._

It makes Lydia laugh so much her knees shake.

Stiles looks so pleased at making Lydia laugh that a weird tension Lydia hadn’t even fully realised was there somehow melts away, and after that, it’s all just kind of easy.

Of course, as it turns out, grocery shopping with Stiles doesn’t actually involve much _grocery shopping_.  It’s more about a hundred tiny fragments of classic Stiles-esque ridiculousness, none of which is that conducive to finding Lydia the food she needs to actually _live on_ for the next week.  It’s more about Stiles racing down the aisles on the back of the shopping carts with Lydia hurrying after her, rolling her eyes.  Stiles climbing a ladder left out by an employee to reach cereal off the top shelf, and pretending she’s about to fall off it so convincingly she almost gives Lydia a heart attack, before dissolving into laughter.  Stiles in the fruit aisle, juggling lemons and flailing her ridiculous lanky arms so much that they go falling all over the floor.  Then repeating with the oranges.  Apples.  Reaching for the watermelons until Lydia smacks her arm away and claims she’ll live without fresh fruit and run the risk of skurvy if it means getting Stiles away from the chance of getting put in supermarket jail.  

The most ridiculous thing of all is when they get mildly lost in the surreal microcosm that is Walmart and end up in the clothing section.  The fact that Lydia would quite literally rather die than wear clothes from Walmart remains true, but she can’t run away with the appropriate amount of disgust, because Stiles’ eyes have lit up and she’s shot off in another direction.  There lies an unattended mannequin.

“Lydia,” says Stiles, when Lydia tries to drag her away before something terrible can happen, “This is the golden opportunity. This is the moment I have been waiting for all my life. This is my destiny, Lydia.  Lydia.  Lydia.”

Lydia gives in to the hyperbole, and sits down on a pile of clearance sale t-shirts while Stiles dresses the mannequin in what can only be described as the most ridiculous outfit even conceived on any planet ever. Multiple hats, not all of them on its head. Bikini bottoms with scarves tucked into them to make a strange kind of string skirt. A ruffled shirt which is simply hideous in its own right.

When Stiles judges it finished, she holds out her phone to Lydia.

“Lyds,” she says, “Take a picture of me with Clarice.”

Lydia rolls her eyes, does, and then they finally go to the check out.

 

While the dead-eyed clerk is ringing up the bizarre collection of items they have accumulated, Stiles looks thoughtful, says, “D’you think they’d hire me?”

Lydia laughs, and she feels ridiculous for it, but in that moment, she falls in love anyway.

*

"You're taking me to the movies tonight."

There's a pause, and Lydia shifts on her bed with a sigh, wedging her phone up against her ear so she can keep painting her toenails.

"...Lydia?"

"I’m sorry, I was assuming you actually lived _in_ the 21st century, and had caller ID."

"...this is _Ethan_."

"I know."

Another pause.  It sounds like he’s talking to someone in the background, but holding the phone far enough away that she can’t really tell.  While she waits, she internally debates the respective merits of Downtown Brown vs Berry Naughty.  Decides on Downtown Brown - it matches her new jacket.

"Right,” Ethan finally replies.  “I just thought maybe you were looking for my brother."

She sighs again.  It seems like she's doing that a lot these days.

" _Sweetheart_.  Listen.  You and I both know that _your_ beloved brother - well, he’s a complete asshole.  He’s barely even my booty call anymore; I have no desire to spend any _time_ with him.  You, on the other hand, I’m considering making an investment in.  So pick me up at eight.”

She hangs up before he has a chance to respond, and sure enough, he turns up at her house at eight on the dot.  They have to take her car, of course, since she refuses to get helmet hair from his ridiculous bike.  She doesn’t mind; she likes driving over being in the passenger seat anyway.

The cashier who rings up their popcorn at the movies is the girl who sits behind Lydia in history, and she smiles while she takes their money.

"Hi, Lydia," she says, while Lydia pretends to remember her name.  "Hi, Aiden."

"I'm Ethan," Ethan says, and then there's an awkward pause where they all just stand there with no real idea why it feels awkward.

"Well," says Lydia, finally, and takes her popcorn.  "See you at school."

Lydia always sits two thirds of the way back in movie theatres, as close to the middle as possible.

"It's where you get the best sound,” she tells Ethan as she maneuvers him back there.

"Is there anything you _don’t_ know?" Ethan asks, but he doesn't sound like most people sound when she spouts off trivia like that, he doesn't sound annoyed or intimidated or even resentful, he sounds kind of amused.

That's a trait that Lydia likes in a friend.  She's had enough of playing dumb to last a lifetime.

The movie they see is objectively awful, but the male lead takes his shirt off a lot so neither of them complain too much.  Lydia makes Ethan share his coke.  It’s probably the nicest date she’s ever been on, and it’s not even a date.

Afterwards, they sit in Lydia’s car in the parking lot, both reluctant to leave.  There’s a hundred things hanging in the air between them - Lydia want to ask about Danny, but then Ethan’ll ask about Stiles.  She wants to ask about Aiden, but doesn’t really want to know anything Ethan’ll tell her, and knows that Ethan doesn’t want to speak about it either.  She wants to ask where he’s living, if he misses Deucalion and Kali and Ennis, what happened to his real parents, how the hell the weird morpho-twins deal works, what his real last freaking _name_ is.  But then he’ll ask things about her that she doesn’t want to talk about - what it’s like being a banshee, how it works, what’s up with _her_ parents, if she has PTSD, _whatever._ So they’re stuck in a haze of unspoken words, of things they need to know but don’t want to tell.  It’s strange, but it’s still better than any date Lydia’s ever been on.

In the end, he’s the one who breaks the silence.

“I don’t know what to tell Danny,” he admits.  “Every time something weird happens around here, he looks so much like he _knows,_ or like he wants to know, and I - I don’t want to tell him.  I don’t want him to freak out.  I don’t want him to be _involved,_ at all.”

Lydia’s never been much good at comfort, but she puts the hand not holding her coffee on Ethan’s knee, and leaves it there for a moment.

“You’ll have to tell him some time,” she says, finally, when she’s figured out what advice she can safely give. “And take it from someone who knows - it’s better if it’s _not_ in the middle of a life or death crisis.”

Ethan pulls a tiny smile, but goes quiet after that, and they leave a few minutes later.

They haven’t even mentioned Stiles the whole evening, but she still drifts into Lydia’s mind on the drive home.  She’d probably have hated the film even more than Lydia did - shirtless guys aren’t made to appeal to Stiles, after all.  

Thinking about Stiles’ dumb reactions, Lydia falls in love.

*

It’s still awkward and weird and Lydia’s not sure what’s going on with them, but 3 am grocery shopping has put her mind at ease at least a little, so when Allison cancels their plans to hang out with Scott for the third time that week, Lydia doesn’t bother to feel guilty about turning up on Stiles’ doorstep.

Stiles opens the door and does a hilarious double take - clearly Lydia was the last person on earth she expected to be on the other side.  After flailing, losing her grip on the door and almost falling over, then catching herself and trying to lean on the doorframe casually like that was what she intended to do all along, she says, “Hi?”, like that, a question.

Lydia rolls her eyes, pushes her way inside, drops her bag on the floor, and says, “So what do normal humans do for fun around here?”

That’s the story of how Lydia ends up sitting on Stiles’ bedroom floor in a borrowed pair of pajamas, playing Call of Duty and getting _way_ too into it.

“I’ve never seen a single human being pick up a video game this quickly,” Stiles keeps saying, her voice some strange mix of awe and loathing, as Lydia simultaneously eats a handful of chips and thrashes Stiles in some kind of combat she’s still not sure she understands.  She’s never actually ever felt quite as much like a slob as she does in that moment, but with Stiles sat right next to her being at least twice as ridiculous, she kind of enjoys it.

“You forget that I’m not _actually_ a human being,” she says, without thinking, and that’s the first time she’s _joked_ about it, the first time she’s acknowledged these wacko powers she still doesn’t fully understand in a way that wasn’t filled with terror.  It’s Stiles.  Stiles makes serious things seem dumb, and Lydia somehow means that entirely as a compliment.

“Lydia, I’ve always known you’re not human,” Stiles replies with a laugh, not taking her eyes off the screen.  “It’s just that I thought you were an angel, and then I found out you were a terrifying creature of the night.  There’s not been much change in how utterly intimidating I find you.”

In borrowed sweatpants and a stained T-shirt, with messy hair and chip crumbs smeared across her face, Lydia kind of doubts she’s all that intimidating.  

Still, it’s always nice to hear, so right then she doesn’t feel too bad about falling in love.

*

And then, suddenly, Lydia just can’t stand it anymore.

Stiles Stilinski.   _Stiles Stilinski._ This amazing, horrific, beautiful, strange, delicate creature, this absurd thing, this girl who has _ruined_ Lydia, who seems to have driven her to insanity, who has lit up her world even when everything in it has seemed so dark.  After everything they’ve suffered and everything Lydia’s sure is still to come, Stiles still just seems to make everything better.  Stiles helps Lydia _breathe._

And Lydia’s in Stiles’ room, they’re studying together, and who would have ever thought they’d do that, it’s ridiculous, but it’s happening, everything these days is just so _different._ And Lydia can’t stand it.

She kisses Stiles Stilinski.

And it’s indescribable, so Lydia won’t even try.  Lydia’s not sappy and she’s not unrealistic, and no, the kissing isn’t perfect. But it’s Stiles, and imperfections and all, Lydia likes it just as it is.

And then -

And then.

And then they lie on Stiles’ bed, and to put it simply, they do more than kiss.

And it’s amazing.

Except that as soon as it’s over, Lydia stands up and pulls her dress back on, quickly, because god, this was a bad idea, this was the worst idea she’s ever had, and she needs to get _out_ of here.

“Going somewhere?” Stiles asks, a little confused, propping herself up on her elbows.  She’s still in just her underwear and it could drive Lydia crazy if she wasn’t already so confused.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got places to be, et cetera,” she says, searching for her socks.  How her fucking _socks_ could get flung so far away she has no idea.

“Well, you - I mean, you could, maybe, like, _stay_ ,” Stiles suggests, and it’s the first time she’s sounded that awkward around Lydia in a long time.

“Look, Stiles, we’re not _dating,_ ” Lydia says, and she knows it’s the lowest blow she could possibly sink by the look on Stiles’ face.  “And I _don’t_ like girls.  A little bit of experimentation is totally normal in your late teens, and I just figured I’d get it out of the way in high school so I don’t have to have a cliched college lesbian experience.”

“Bullshit,” Stiles says, but she’s sitting up and pulling her dumb t-shirt back over her head, and looks like she believes every word Lydia’s saying.

“It’s actually quite a compliment to you,” Lydia goes on.  “Your only real competition for the honor was Allison, and she’d never go for it, she’s too into Scott.  And, well, I suppose it’s only natural that you and me have a stronger connection anyway, after how many traumatic situations we’ve faced together.  It’s really basic psychology.  But it didn’t _mean_ anything.”

Lydia’s fully dressed by now, just pulling on her second shoe and scooping up her bag, but she somehow doesn’t feel like she can leave, even though that’s what she’s been trying to do the whole time she was getting dressed.  She’s stuck to the ground, stuck in the middle of Stiles’ dumb teenage boy room, unable to tear her eyes off the stupid lanky idiot in the Star Wars underpants and too big shirt who’s perched on the edge of the bed looking utterly _wrecked._ Lydia’s tried and tried and sometimes almost succeeded, but she’s never, _never,_ been able to wreck somebody quite the way she knows she just wrecked Stiles.

“So you should go, then,” Stiles says, and doesn’t even sound like herself, those aren’t words like Stiles would say them, at least not the Stiles Lydia knows.

Lydia wants to stay, all of a sudden, wants to take it all back just so Stiles will sound like Stiles again.

She wants to stay.  She leaves.  She falls in love, and she breaks her own heart at the same time.

*

It’s a while before she remembers about Aiden.

The thing is, about Aiden, is that they had that whole fuck buddies who kind of hate each other thing going on, and it was fine.  And then the huge battle with Miss Blake and the Alpha Pack and everything went down, and Aiden almost died and then he said _I knew you liked me,_ and Lydia had laughed, and it had been, sort of, like they were on the way to being something more.  That was clearly a doorway to more, right?  That was an invitation.

But, somehow, they just got _stuck_ in that phase, that not quite there phase, so they couldn’t go back to casual but they couldn’t quite make their way to serious, either.  And Lydia never liked him as a person that much anyway.  She can’t deny the attraction was more than physical, but at the same time, it wasn’t exactly intellectual.

And now she’s gone and hooked up with Stiles, and _whatever_ that will end up meaning, she knows it’s still not fair to Aiden.

She dumps him at school the next day.  He comes up and leans on her locker like he always does, smiling and winking and asking her if she wants to find a dark corner of the library in their free period, and she just looks up at him and says, “Aiden, it’s over.”

They have a conversation about it, but in the end, he doesn’t seem all that cut up. He walks away with his head held high and all his usual confidence, after a minimal amount of anger, and he doesn’t look back at her.

When she sees Stiles moonwalking around the corner at the other end of the corridor, Scott doubled over with laughter behind her, Lydia knows she’s made the right decision.

After all, she’s falling in love.

*

When her dad invites her to dinner, he sounds pleasant, and he doesn’t say, “oh, and we’ll also be joined by my shallow new jailbait girlfriend who’s only dating me for my money.”  Nonetheless, when Lydia finds herself at the nicest restaurant in town on a night that by the nature of joint-custody would usually belong to her mother, she pretty much knows what she’s expecting.  She’s heard this song before.

Sure enough, she’s met by her father and a girl she’s pretty sure she remembers being at Beacon Hills High when Lydia was in middle school.  So.

Lydia’s got plenty of parental issues, but if there’s one thing that could be said, it’s that she’s never had a problem with their divorce.  She hadn’t been thrilled about how much it uprooted her life, but she’s always been painfully aware of just _how_ incompatible they truly were, and when her dad moved out and the fighting stopped it was nothing less than a relief.  And if either of them were to ever find a suitable partner, someone remotely age appropriate who had a single thing in common with them, Lydia would be happy for them.  She would.  She’s fine with the whole idea of inheriting someone else’s family by extension.

The thing is, her mother doesn’t date, or if she does she doesn’t mention it, and her father - well.  Her father has a tendency of picking the most inappropriate girls it is humanly possible to find.  

Lydia is opposed to this trend of his because of many different principles.  The feminist in her feels sorry for the girls who need to define themselves by their bodies, suck up to a rich older man to make themselves feel - what, worthy? Beautiful? Or maybe they have more financial motivations than that.  She also just plain hates to see her father, a not altogether pleasant man but nonetheless her _father,_ with people who don’t make him happy, just take take _take_ from him all the time.  It hurts to think that _he_ thinks that’s the way he’s happy.  The whole thing, really, just kind of hurts.  Lydia tries not to get involved in his lovelife for exactly this reason.

This one’s called Mandy, she learns while she eats pasta as passive-aggressively as she knows how.  Mandy’s doing a degree in Textiles because she wants to go into fashion; Mandy’s from New York and just hates small town California life; Mandy’s dad is a banker on Wall Street and she loves him more than anything.

Mandy’s a brat, is what she is.

Lydia barely says a word throughout the meal, bar the odd scathing remark, and she turns down dessert, desperate to get out of there.

“See you soon, Dad,” she says when she gets into her car, doesn’t even look Mandy’s way, and drives off.

And then, somehow, before she knows it, she’s outside Stiles’ door.

It’s not like she’s _upset,_ exactly, she’s used to this, she knows how to deal. It’s just that she doesn’t want to be alone. It used to be, after this kind of an evening, she’d go to Jackson, and they’d act like jerks to each other and never let their true emotions slip and comfort themselves with some kind of physical pleasure that always made her feel a little less lonely, but never quite enough. After Jackson was over, it became Allison whose doorstep she’d frequent at times like this, and they’d do homework and eat popcorn and paint their nails and not talk about things, but in a different kind of way to how Jackson and Lydia didn’t talk about things, a nicer way, and she always felt a little better after those evenings.

She doesn’t know when Allison was replaced by Stiles. It’s all happened so gradually and yet so quickly at the same time. All she knows is that she feels like she needs someone, and she goes to Stiles. Rings the doorbell, and Stiles doesn’t even look all that surprised when she opens the door.

“We’re watching The Notebook,” Lydia says, because confidence is kind of all she has at times like this. “Do you have popcorn?”

“Sure,” says Stiles, blessed Stiles, who doesn’t even question it, doesn’t think to argue. She lets Lydia in, downloads The Notebook on her laptop, pops caramel popcorn in the microwave, lets Lydia lean against her shoulder and doesn’t judge her for crying at the sad parts of the film even though she’s seen it a thousand times.

When the end credits roll, Stiles kisses Lydia, the first time she’s made the first move, kisses her softly and slowly and passionately, pushes her down on the sofa and kisses her for hours, but never does anything more.

This kind of evening is better than Jackson, it’s better than Allison.  This is what Lydia has always needed on nights when she’s felt this way.  And knowing that, she knows also that she is hopelessly, incurably, falling in love.

*

Lydia tried to count it, once, and she’s pretty sure that around 80% of the worst things that have happened to her have happened in the woods.  She thinks that percentage holds for bad things that happen in Beacon Hills in general, too, so she’s always a little wary about anything involving their horrifically shady forest.

Which is why when Allison says they’re all going camping, Lydia’s only response is, “No.”

“In a field!” Allison is quick to clarify, laughing slightly and waving her apple in the air as if to gesture how totally carefree she is.  “A nice, open, non haunted field, really close to civilisation, where nothing bad could possibly happen.”

Lydia considers her for a moment.

“... no.”

“Oh, come _on_ Lydia, why not?”

“Well, you just said nothing bad could possibly happen.  That completely guarantees that if we go - which we’re not, by the way - something bad is actually definitely going to happen.”

Lydia doesn’t actually ever remember changing her point of view on this, only that Stiles and Scott had joined them at the lunch table at that point in the conversation, and Stiles had sat really close and smelled like citrus shampoo and started talking about how _psyched_ she was for camping, and before she knew it Lydia was dressed in her best attempt at ‘camping chic’ (fitted cargo pants, Italian wool sweater, designer hi tops), watching Scott try to put up a tent single handed.

So.

It’s okay, for a while. The tents get set up with minimal casualties, and they build a fire, and toast marshmallows over it, and Lydia finds herself horrifically surprised by the fact that she’s actually having _fun._ She’s camping in the middle of a field, she’s cold and eating sugary junk food that’s probably going to give her a headache, she’s swatting bugs off left and right, but she’s having _fun._ It’s the people, she decides. Lydia isn’t always particularly receptive to company. She knows she can be difficult, sarcastic and haughty and condescending, and over her life, that’s kind of meant that she’s never gotten close to anyone.  People respect her, people fear her, but people haven’t always wanted to _know_ her.

Now, she has all these friends.  They’re dumb and ridiculous and annoying, and they’re _hers,_ and Lydia loves them all so much it makes her feel about to burst.

When it starts to get dark, they all get in their sleeping bags, still around the fire, and just chat. They don’t tell ghost stories, because their whole lives are ghost stories. Instead, they talk about school and movies and tell stupid jokes.  It’s no pressure.  Something about being out in the open like this - it just takes away all the _pressure._ Lydia’s never realised before how constantly on edge she feels, in every aspect of her life.

Stiles is sat across the circle from her, and they make eye contact sometimes, and smile, but it’s a little too far away to really hold a conversation with any sort of privacy.  Still, they trade comments occasionally, and when Stiles nestles so far down in her sleeping bag that she’s just a pair of big brown eyes with a bad hair do, Lydia rolls her eyes and says, “Warm enough?” as sarcastically as she can manage.

"Snug as a bug in a ten dollar Walmart sleeping bag," Stiles replies, and Lydia can't help it.  She laughs.

It's one of those mystical moments she's heard about, the ones that happen in slow motion.  She goes to roll her eyes, play it off like she always does when Stiles makes a dumb, funny sarcastic comment - which is, actually, about every five seconds, so Lydia rolls her eyes a _lot_.  But this time, when she goes to do it, a neuron misfires in her brain or _something_ , because she giggles instead and she knows she has to be staring at Stiles with the most ridiculously _smitten_ expression ever.  If this were a bad film, it'd be the point where the background music cuts off suddenly and comedically, she thinks, as every single one of their friends' heads snaps towards her, slack jawed.

"Did you just _laugh_ at something _Stiles_ said?" Allison asks, like she thinks Lydia's some kind of evil robot who's not able to process genuine emotions such as amusement.

“No,” Lydia responds, before realising that makes her sound ten times guiltier, and leaping up.  “I’m going to look around.”

The concept of _looking around_ the basically empty field they’re in is, of course, ridiculous, and just makes it even more obvious that something’s up, but once she’s said that she can hardly just go and sit back down, so she makes her way over to a big ish boulder not too far away from their tent and makes a valiant attempt at looking interested in it.

She can still hear Stiles laughing from behind the boulder.

When she comes back, her head held as high as she can manage, they’re all eying her suspiciously as they carry on their various conversations. Stiles and Scott get a little bit of the attention off her by starting a caterpillar race in their sleeping bags and accidentally crushing one of the tents, but Allison still sneaks over and says to her, “We _are_ going to have this conversation some time, Lydia.”

Lydia can’t even feel worried about it, because right then, she’s watching Stiles make two s'mores talk to each other, and she’s falling in love.

*

Danny finds out about werewolves in the hands on kind of way.

As in, quite literally, he has his _hands on Ethan,_ and then Ethan turns into a werewolf.

So.

Ethan doesn’t just transform for the fun of it, of course.  There’s actual, legitimate, scary things going on.  The reason Danny has his hands on Ethan at that particular moment is that Danny’s been kidnapped, held hostage in an abandoned warehouse by an evil unknown, and Lydia, Stiles, Allison, Ethan, Isaac and Scott are just conducting their dashing rescue attempt.  Danny’s tied to some horrifically cliche abandoned scaffolding in the middle of the warehouse, and Ethan rushes over and unties him, and then wraps him up in a hug.

Which is, of course, precisely when the unknown evil decides to make itself known.  By tackling Ethan.

Lydia stays away from the fighting.  She’s still not quite sure what her role is supposed to be in all of this.  She has a power, sure, but she doesn’t know how that works or what to do about it either - she’s waiting, always it seems, a little tense inside, just _waiting_ to feel another scream take over her body, to know that something bad is about to happen and she’s going to have to know about it first.  God, she hates it still, the losing control, the way the screams control her, drag her out of her own mind, hates the way it reminds her so much of being locked in Peter Hale’s grasp.  Since she decided to stop fighting it, it’s a little better.  Not really, though.

But screaming is no help in a fight, and Lydia doesn’t know why she’s here.  Scott and Ethan and Isaac have their claws; Allison has her bow.  Stiles has _something,_ always,a baseball bat sometimes or mountain ash or some other weird concoction of Deaton’s, Stiles always finds a way to make herself useful.

Except.  Actually.  This time.  Stiles wraps an arm around Lydia like she did when the birds attacked Miss Blake’s classroom a million years ago, and they crouch behind a few empty crates together, block out the whirlwind of fighting going on around them, their friend fighting some beast that seems to whiz around the room and leave thunder in its wake.  It’s loud and scary and Lydia doesn’t think about how much better she feels for being huddled under Stiles’ arm.

When it’s over, Allison’s hurt, not too bad but Scott and Isaac immediately rush her out to her car so they can patch her up with the first aid kit in it.  Which leaves Lydia, Stiles and Ethan standing around while Danny presumably has a mental breakdown on the inside.

He actually just looks calm and slightly amused, like Danny always looks, but there’s no way that can be legit right now.  So Lydia’s going with the internal breakdown theory.

And nobody’s saying anything.

So of course, it’s Stiles who breaks the silence.  Danny’s standing there, a little bit away from the rest of them just _staring,_ and Stiles claps her hands together, makes an awkward sound with her mouth, and walks over to him.

"I hate to paraphrase Buffy The Vampire Slayer," she says, clapping Danny on the shoulder when she reaches him, "but - werewolves exist, a lot of them live in Beacon Hills, Ethan'll fill you in."

She then walks away, stretching her arms above her head and observing the wreckage around them with a worryingly casual familiarity.

"Look, I know this is completely insane and you're freaking out -" Ethan begins, starting towards Danny, but Danny cuts him off.

"Actually, it explains a _lot_."

So that's that.

Afterwards, when Stiles drops Lydia off at home, she leans over like she’s going to say something deep or important or ask _are you okay_ in the kind of horrifically sympathetic voice that Lydia most despises.

Instead, she says, “I, uh, don’t _actually_ hate to paraphrase Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I do it all the time.”

Lydia laughs, shakes her head, falls in love.

*

Lydia’s popular now, and she’s been popular her whole life.  From the first time she set foot in her kindergarten classroom, the smallest one there but without a shake in her step, she’s had people at her beck and call.  It’s one of the benefits of being the smartest person in any room you should happen to find yourself in; she’s always known how to play people.

The only time she’s ever even remotely doubted her lead has been when she’s around Stiles.  Not her lead in popularity - that’s clearly a done and dusted tale, Stiles wears t-shirts with video game characters on the front and swears in Dothraki; Lydia wears Prada and fucks lacrosse players.  But her lead in smarts.  Well, that’s a different story altogether.

Because Stiles isn’t a genius.  Stiles isn’t even good in school; every year she makes a joke about her grades spelling ACDC.  But Stiles loves learning and loves knowledge and when she gets obsessed with something you know there’s no way anyone is gonna know more about it than her, and that, more than anything else, sets her apart from the herd in Lydia’s eyes.  So maybe, all those years Lydia wasn’t noticing Stiles, she actually was.  A little bit.  Out of the corner of her eye.

And maybe, just maybe, she was never all that straight, either.  Maybe she did love Jackson and maybe she did like Aiden’s body, but maybe she’d also stared a little when Erica walked into the cafeteria after her makeover, maybe she’d felt the need to make a snide comment just to cover that up.

And maybe nothing that’s happened should actually have been that big of a shock at all.

Maybe she’s been falling in love for longer than she thinks.

*

In the end, it all comes down to Stiles’ jeep once again.

Lydia calls one morning for a ride.  Her car’s fine, and so’s Allison, so Lydia really, honestly, couldn’t have found an excuse to ride with Stiles if she tried.

That’s why she doesn’t try.

She just tells Stiles to pick her up, and Stiles does, and Lydia doesn’t wear sensible shoes so she still stumbles about and nearly breaks her ankle trying to get into the car. They still don’t talk much, on the way, Lydia plays on her phone and Stiles sings along to the relatively decent music she’s tuned the radio to, and very occasionally they glance at each other and smile, but not too much.

When they get to school, Lydia touches up her lipstick, looking in the rear view mirror, and just like before, Stiles comes around and opens the car door for her, offers her a hand down.  Lydia takes it, exits the Jeep a little more gracefully than she has in the past.

They walk into school together, talking about their classes that day. Nothing earth shattering, nothing important, just _what did you write about in this essay_ and _ugh I’m dreading that teacher_. A few people look at them, but mostly nobody notices, or nobody cares, or both, or something like that.  Somehow, it doesn’t bother Lydia.  Their friends are at the other end of the corridor, and Lydia and Stiles walk towards them, together.

And Lydia is still holding Stiles’ hand.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [and the sun came out. - ART](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1068675) by [8611](https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611)




End file.
